Can Russian gypsies lull theft victims?
MOSCOW – He was striking, with dark eyes, a black ponytail and a stylish suit. He had a large, cheap ring Olga couldn’t stop looking at as he waved his hand repeatedly in front of her face.
Olga offered him the $250 in her purse for a taxi, but he said it wouldn’t be enough. She found herself leading the man up to her apartment. There, she opened her safe and counted out $500.
“Can I have more?” he asked.
Without replying, Olga emptied her wallet into his hands.
As they rode back down the elevator, Olga knew the man was a thief. She knew she should demand her money back. But she couldn’t speak.
“I was in a trance,” she said later.
Almost immediately after he left, Olga broke into sobs and phoned a friend, who persuaded her to go to the police. There, detectives nodded knowingly.
“Gypsy hypnosis,” they said.
Across Moscow, hundreds of victims a year say they were seduced of their money in seemingly chance encounters. Many claim they were hypnotized by intense stares, mesmerizing babble and warnings of curses on their loved ones.
To some of Moscow’s detectives, the idea of street hypnosis has the whiff of mumbo-jumbo. Not so to many Russians raised on folk tales of vampires – and, in the modern era, the hidden powers of the mind.
Czarina Alexandra fell under the hypnotic influence of “mad monk” Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin in the early 20th century. The late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had a psychic healer. President Boris Yeltsin had a consultant to protect the former chief from “external psychophysical influence” after a mysterious antenna was found in his office.
In 2001, President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill making it illegal to employ “electromagnetic, infrasound … radiators” and other weapons of “psychotronic influence” with intent to cause harm.
The attraction to mysticism has intensified in recent years, Russian sociologists say, because of the tough economic climate and pent-up interest released with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its long-standing prohibitions on against dabbling in the occult practices.